I know it's three weeks old but I'm finally getting around to blogging about Valentine's. This was Felix's first Valentine's Day at school and with Kelly's (Tru's good friend Charlie's mother) help he made "love bugs" rather than bringing cards. That is, of course, a tray of the love bugs in the picture. As Valentine's was celebrated at Felix's school on a Friday, I got to drop him off and pick him up. At school he made some kind of Valentine's headdress (pictured) that he had to wear for at least the rest of the day. Even when we went to Trader Joe's for our weekly shopping trip. (Felix waited very patiently to get to make that headdress and made a long beaded necklace with me at the Valentine party. He was a little shy with other moms that day but he was determined to get into one of the last spots open at that station. I was proud of his tenaciousness and patience. - added by RH 3/10/09)

Last weekend Felix visited his first art museum, the Seattle Art Museum, he liked it well enough; the lobby had Ford Taurus's in various states of a flip. I'm not sure why, anyway, Felix was amused by it. Here he is standing underneath one that is suspended from the ceiling.

As I probably mentioned before, Felix is really into dinosaurs right now. He is actually pretty adept at identifying various types of dinosaurs. Such is his love for dinosaurs that... well, here is the story: At around 5am the other morning, it's still dark and we are sleeping in bed. All of the sudden Felix exclaims, very clearly, "I'm pretending I'm an allosaurus". Because it was dark I couldn't see his eyes though I could tell he was facing me. I put my hand on him so that he knows I've heard him, he then raises his arm and has drawn his hand back with his fingers spread apart and curved as if to make a claw. I then do the same, but he didn't do anything else, as my eyes adjusted I could now see that he was still asleep. That whole scene was so cute, I almost woke Renae to tell her about it. Also, he said it so clearly I didn't even think that he might just be dreaming.

And finally, last week we lost a very dear neighbor. Dusty was 95 and lived in our neighborhood since it was built in the early 40's. (Felix and Renae regularly visited Dusty. At first Felix just feared this old man that required shouting in order to hear and always asked Felix if he was ready to play football but after some time he warmed up to him. When Dusty moved into assisted living Felix would make himself quite comfortable at his apartment and entertained a lot of the other residents. - added by RH 3/10/09)

After his death, Renae and another neighbor, Jennifer, were working on his memorial and got access to a lifetime of his photos, photos from when he was a baby in 1913, his time in WWII, the passing's of his first and then second wife, through his years in our neighborhood. He will really be missed. The below picture is from 1964, in front of his house, the house across the street from us. (This was Felix's first encounter with this part of the circle of life and it has opened up some questions for him but the hardest part for him was giving up so much of his time with me while I cared for Dusty and then helped wrap up things up after he passed. Hopefully things will settle down more now. - added by RH 3/10/09)